I read a little Bio on this guy Snowden and noticed his meteoric rise in "Government Work". Seems awful fishy to me. He was hired as a
security guard, then moved up to IT dept & worked for the CIA. Quite a quick success for a high school dropout isn't it? Hummm

Alphabet soup agencies dealing with datamining and hacking routinely go outside the normal loop for hiring. t's not abnormal for someone to be hired into a placeholder position such as a custodian and then moved into what they were really hired to do when their security clearances come through.

One of my friends growing up was a junior high dropout, hired by DEC as a security consultant at 14 years old.

The one eyed man in the kingdom of the blind wasn't king, he was stoned for seeing light.

Alphabet soup agencies dealing with datamining and hacking routinely go outside the normal loop for hiring. t's not abnormal for someone to be hired into a placeholder position such as a custodian and then moved into what they were really hired to do when their security clearances come through.

One of my friends growing up was a junior high dropout, hired by DEC as a security consultant at 14 years old.

I see that you disagree, No surprise there. What "training" did he have for the job? Gov. agencies (in IT for example) rarely hire out of the private sector, it's
generally the other way around. Government jobs are training fields for the private sector.

I think he might have had some good recommendations from somewhere.

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Government jobs in IT aren't a training ground for the private sector, as government IT operations are normally 5-10 years behind private sector software and firmware versions due to contracting requirements. They used to be the source for private sector IT employees, but that has changed, and hasn't been the case for at least a decade.

The Government LAN operations are handled in house to a point, but the data transfer from the router in the building to the router at the other end goes through the TELCO cloud. Outsourcing is a wonderful thing, unless you give a damn about data security, which was lost in the tech transfers to China in the 1990s when Cisco and others got ITARS approval to give source code to China n exchange for the ability to set up cheap manufacturing facilities there. The Chinese don't need information from Mr. Snowden, they own the backbone. If you build the backbone of the internet, tapping data off of it is a cakewalk.

As to what training he had for the job, it doesn't take a degree to get network certifications. A book, a test, and you have your certificate.

The one eyed man in the kingdom of the blind wasn't king, he was stoned for seeing light.